People, this is an interesting thing to follow first-hand. Hyperion, the company behind AmigaOS4, has been talking about its "Most Ambitious Project" for a while now, but on December 31, they started teasing the Amiga community like crazy. They opened a site called a-eon.com, which is most likely about the MAP.

The teaser site has the Amiga community scrambling to find answers. The site gets new clues as time goes by, and so far, it's quite difficult to make out what, actually, Hyperion is teasing. The thread over at AmigaWorld.net about this subject is mandatory reading material if you're interested in this, as many possible interpretations and solutions are being discussed.

If you want to take a crack at it yourself, be prepared - this is pretty good stuff. For instance, one of the clues shows an Amiga window with a question mark icon; the background of the window contained what appeared to be random letters and numbers, but when put through a base64 decoder, it contained a hidden message:

What is X, if not a letter,
Perhaps an Omen, or even better?

The main theme so far seems to be the letter X, but there are various other clues which point into the direction of new hardware, and possible SMP support for AmigaOS - which could mean new hardware with multicore processors. That's just one possible explanation though.

A new clue is supposed to appear within a few hours, so maybe we'll know more then. I'm posting this here, because maybe us OSNews people can lend a helping hand in decoding this mystery. In any case, I have to hand it to Hyperion - this is class A hype generation right here. We'll keep you updated.